Just in time to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Prague Spring comes this charming adaptation of the charming 1971 novel by Bohumil Hrabal, one of the great writers (along with Kundera, Havel, and Skvorecky) of that hopeful, doomed era. I Served the King is a gallows- humor comedy about a young man who just wants to own a fancy hotel and make sweet, sweet love to pretty young ladies. He is constantly battered by the forces of Czech history—Nazis, Communists—but never loses his light, scheming spirit. (See movie times, www .thestranger.com, for details.)